This compilation from a fictional ’80s video game company is constantly clever. By comparison, Atari’s latest resurrection effort, Yars Rising, is frustratingly banal.
Two recent video games lean on the world’s constant need for nostalgia by refashioning the wistful into something new — sometimes brilliantly and sometimes with mixed results.
UFO 50
UFO 50 took more than seven years to create, an understandably long gestation for the 50 full games in this astounding compilation. Dozens of games spill from a static screen featuring computer disks bearing minimalist art. The mash-ups, imitations and paeans are all inspired by products of the ’80s, that more innocent time when games were smaller — and much harder to complete. Here, all can be played using a few strokes of the keyboard.
There’s a potent faux history that we’re looking back at the standouts from UFO Soft, a fictional game company that was “obscure but ahead of its time.” Packed in are so many completely different genres that choosing one is like opening a door to an ingenious Advent calendar.
The result is a head-spinning psychotropic experience. To save puffins, I played as a flying walrus in Waldorf’s Journey, which recalled the indie legend Jeff Minter’s faster-paced Llamatron. In Rakshasa, I was a bulky warrior who rises from the dead to battle fireball-spewing flowers with skull faces within a demon-filled Hindi setting. When I died by an enemy’s spear, I could procure an extra life by playing a nightmarish Asteroids of the dead, avoiding the green skulls, red eyes and pink bubbles trying to destroy me.
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